


Stop Practicing

by KittyViolet



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel 616, West Coast Avengers, Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: Archery, Bedroom Sex, Dimension Travel, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Hide and Seek, Pillow & Blanket Forts, Strap-Ons, Vibrators
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-07 11:59:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16408073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Kate wants her favorite bow back. But America knows what she needs.





	1. Chapter 1

The sunshine feels good on her shoulders, but still: Kate hurts. Not as bad as she’s been hurt, but she does hurt. She’s sore, and it might just be perseveration: the feeling you get when you practice over and over, to diminishing returns. It’s definitely not the range’s fault: if anything, Los Angeles makes it far easier to find someplace to shoot arrows, to try out new quivers, to check your technique, since it’s more spread out—long flat outdoor spaces are easier to find—than they could ever have been back in New York. She’s getting more practice than ever, and more sunlight too, and the Astroturf even feels OK under her boots. And yet, here on her new range, her technique is…. not what it should be. Distraction? Nervousness? Fatigue? 

“That looks good,” Johnny had said, before he scooted away on his moped. But Kate only got her regulation arrows three deep, each spiked head splitting the stock of the one before, a triple Robin Hood, before the fourth one nicked the head of the third and fell away. She can always manage a quintuple Robin Hood shot, these days, when she’s in top form. Was it just the fight with Madame Masque? Is she worried about Clint, who can’t take care of himself, and yet always takes care of himself? Is it (once again) about her mom? 

Whatever it is, she’s ever so slightly off. The outdoor testing cabinet (thank you, Mr. Stark; thanks, Clint, for asking) releases a fist-sized metal gadget into the air, a steel hummingbird, razor-edged wings flapping madly; Kate is supposed to be able to fire a net-release arrow to where the bird will be, so that the cords deploy around the wings when they’re folded up, mid-beat. If she gets the timing even a second wrong, the wings cut the net cords up and the bird zooms in towards her; misfire again, and the bird will divebomb her with dye that will turn her hair green for a day.

Kate does not want green hair. It’s a perverse incentive. But it gets her practicing. Stay in shape, Kate. (That's what comes from hanging out with people who can fly, and change shapes, and cast spells. They can slack off with the physical conditioning. She can't. But she can also exhaust herself.)

The first arrow zips past the bird and deploys inches off, so that the bird slices up the half-deployed net. Bad job, Kate. (Those things are expensive.) But Kate has the second arrow already notched, cocked, fired at where she knows the bird is going to flit next. That bird goes down.

And then disappears, into a star shaped portal that shocks Kate for half a second, before she realizes what the shape means, and how glad she is to see it.

“You’re off today, chica,” America says. The portal disappears in front of the archer, but her best friend has turned up a few feet beside her, out of arrow range. America walks slowly up till the two girls stand side to side, and brushes Kate's exposed shoulder with her fingers. “Maybe we should practice together.”

“I miss that,” Kate says, and draws her elbow back a twenty-seventh, or maybe a forty-seventh time. (Yes, it hurts.) The late afternoon light is still warm enough in L.A. to make her hair feel slightly toasty, a bit too flat, if she doesn’t move around enough. So she moves, starts to walk to the garage-sized houselet at the end of the practice field, past the big bullseye, her bow in her hand—

It’s not in her hand. Her bow is gone. The bow she worked so hard to get, and to steal back from Clint in New York, her favorite bow—she has others but this is her favorite, favorite compound bow—is not in her hand.

It’s in America’s hand. And then it’s not. A star forms, and vanishes, and the tough extrovert from the Utopian Parallel has gone through the star with her supposedly best friend’s best bow, and it’s obviously an invitation, so Kate leaps through the star before it can close—

and they’re indoors, in one room with no obvious door or corridor leading away, just lots of pillows, a few windows, a slanted ceiling so low that her tallest friend could not stand up inside. It's one of the most cluttered, and friendliest, places that Kate has ever seen; the ceiling is ribbed and arced and (probably simulated) wood and warm, like the inside of an upside-down rowboat but bigger, and something in the ceiling heats the place up like a good beach day on an East Coast summer; and when Kate looks down there are red white and blue pillows everywhere, multiple camisoles in primary colors, a queen bed that’s almost the size of the room, old Ms. America costumes sloppily folded and left in piles, a brand-new iPad completely covered in stickers for Sotomayor University, a slightly older iPad, a couple of xPhones dangling from their cords, two copies of that amazing Evel Knievel style white motorcycle jacket (one with have had the arms cut off), stacks of books with titles in Spanish and English and Armenian and Doop (who knew America could read Doop?) and one pentagonal window that looks out on… the Crab Nebula? deep space?

“My bedroom,” America says.

“But I’ve seen your bedroom! I’ve slept in your bedroom! I’ve slept in five of your bedrooms! in five dimensions!” Kate says. “And where’s my bow!” The frustration is part of the fun. But she does want that bow.

“This is my other bedroom, bestie,” America says. It’s also her smallest one yet; it’s honestly not designed for standing up. Kate stops trying and flops down on the bed. “I knew—”

“—across the multiverse, even, you knew—”

“—that you needed a break, amiga, so I brought you here.” America is in her element, flopped down on her back, propped up on one pillow, her boots on another.

“Where is here? And where’s my bow?”

“You’ve been practicing too hard. But—”

Kate sticks out her tongue at her friend and blows a mild raspberry.

“You can have your lovely legacy kickass heirloom bow thing back so nobody ever doubts that you’re the real Hawkeye. But you have to give me something first.”

“OK, you interdimensional prankster, I will go back to my California or my New York or any Earth you choose and bring you back whatever you want in exchange for my bow, if it’s something I can get. Or steal. Unless it’s Johnny’s, of course. We don’t take each other’s stuff without permission.”

“It's something you can give me without leaving this room. And I’m pretty sure you already have permission.” America looks Kate in the eye. It’s been a while, but she definitely knows she has permission. From Johnny, from her favorite fuertona, from herself.

America adjusts her body so that she’s leaning forward, toward Kate, but her thighs move away from her friend, and away from each other a little, so that there’s an angle in between them, enough for the fashionably threadbare bits of the denim shorts to really show. America’s skin is darker than the pale blue denim. Kate wants her hand on that skin. Her friend, she sees, wants her hand there too.

But first—tickling? America has her left hand all over her friend’s ribcage, armpit, inner arm, neck, and Kate is actually giggling like she hasn’t done in years until the hand gets to her elbow. “Ow ow OWIE ow.”

The point of the tickling was not just to tickle, but to let America remove Kate’s arm guard, because even a super-responsive, Stark Industries-level piece of hard plastic elbow armor can get in the way of good cuddling. The girls embrace and flip over so that America is on top, then shift slightly to protect Kate’s visible bruises. All-day archery will do that.

“I’m not in any position,” Kate begins, with mock reluctance, but America ends, with confidence: “You are exactly in a position.”

America isn’t wearing her Evel Knievel jacket, but her denim one, to go with the shorts: and then she’s not—she flings it off, and leans in towards her friend, and her friend shoves her down on the bed with her left arm (careful to protect that exposed right elbow) and then leans in, lips already parted, to kiss her for real.


	2. Chapter 2

They kiss and then separate, slightly. “I think I can give you what you want. But my favorite bow better be waiting at the end,” Kate says. “You didn’t just take just any lavender-inlay high-osmium-action extra-compound oval-tip bow. You took my very favorite--”

“Worth the wait,” America says, shifting back so that she’s resting in between about five throw pillows, her star-spangled top already pushed up to show her taut belly. (Sotomayor University probably has fantastic workout facilities, Kate thinks absently. Can Kate visit her friend’s other home and use them?) “Also, I don’t think those are even archery terms. You just made them up.”

“It really is lavender,” Kate says. “And it really is my favorite.” She’s been stalling a bit while she fishes in her own zipper-compartmented legging for a thumb-sized plastic thing (also purple, of course), size and shape like a clamshell, which she palms and then produces and then, with her palm in between America’s thighs, activates.

“Oh,” Chavez says, for now still able to speak. “Is that—have you put an arrowhead next to my—in my—oh! Keep it there for now?” And then, before she’s totally absorbed, “Is that an arrowhead? Do you do everything with arrows?” 

“Dual use technology,” Kate says. Just holding it there, keeping her whole arm motionless while she settles into her friend’s body, keeping her palm where the clamshell will do the work: the goals, and the action, relaxes Kate a bit. 

Kate is still fully dressed, and in practice gear too. (She carefully unlatches a couple of costume pieces that feel more like armor.) Kate can feel her bruises, and she doesn’t have a healing factor of course, but they feel as if they were speedily healing, her own body knitting back to what it should be as she gets involved in her best friend’s pleasure. For once she isn’t going to fall on her face. She’s not going to need anybody to rescue her. 

She won’t do the rescuing, either. “Smooth vibro-arrows come with a lot of settings,” she says while her friend hums, eyes closed, beneath her. “They fit a lot of heads.”

(“Come,” Kate hears herself say. And “heads.” How involved, how lost in erotic feelings, does Kate have to be before she stops feeling awkward, before she concentrates entirely, before she stops seeing targets, or hearing puns? She’s not there yet.

“Mmmmhmmmm,” America says, strands of brown hair between her lips as she shifts position, opening her legs further. “Mmmhmmm?”

America manages to rip her own denim shorts, and then her blue panties off—really rip, not just drag or finesse off her thighs. As soon as they’re on the mattress, and not on her body, the shorts reconstitute. Legit superheroes can order almost any costume they want from unstable molecules; America must be the first one to get distressed denim shorts. 

Convenient, Kate thinks. She moves the clamshell-vibro-arrowhead away and moves down, and bends down, and starts to lick. It’s not the first time she’s tasted America there, but there haven’t been many times: she’s missed it. Her tongue gets lost in the wet clefts, the silvers of ocean, like salt and excitement and nectarines and exercise, her hearing muffled by her fuertona friend’s thighs, and Kate’s tongue moves in and out, back and forth, in and out, as America hums, head tilted back still. But Kate’s tongue gets tired.

America deserves to enjoy her own body the way she has with Kate before, the way Kate did with Tommy too—not the same way, a different way, one that’s more…. hands-on, maybe. 

What made America want to save Kate? or come to California to join their team? or turn their friendship back into—friends with benefits?

Kate shifts again and sits up so that her finger, and then another finger, move where her tongue used to be. “My star,” Kate says softly. “My rescuer. My bestie—“

She’s moving her fingers faster now, going inside. America bucks a little, stops, tilts her head back. In the skylight are all the worlds—no, some of the worlds—America could save: by punching bad guys, or just by being her proud, bad, visible self, her boots, that jacket, the muscle around her ribs, the way that she wants to punch first, but asks questions too…

America’s toes curl around a knitted blanket. Kate keeps her fingers where they have been as her friend’s thighs slowly contract, and stop contracting. 1, 2…. 1,2… But she’s trying too hard. It’s not about their connection; it’s about something Kate Bishop wants to do for her friend, something one girl wants to give the other, rather than something they’re doing together. 

Of course it is. When she’s with her other friends Kate is always the one who’s first when the fairy tale honors the one who goes third: the clumsy detective, the too-attentive apprentice, the girl who wants too much to get it right, who tries too hard. It’s the same with America, isn’t it? The same—

“Kate Bishop,” America Chavez says. “Stop practicing.”

Brown eyes look into blue eyes. “You know what I want you to give me?” America says. “You know what I missed with you in L.A. and me at the university?”

Has the right mood abandoned them entirely? But they’re still tangled up on America’s bed, here in America’s…. bedroom, or pillow fort, or interdimensional love nest. “Amy?” Kate has almost never called America Amy; she abandoned the nickname after they started hanging out, as if it were a bad habit, but in such moments it can still pop out.

“I want you to give me… you.” And America Chavez kisses Kate Bishop with the kind of force that says we both need a break from our lives, a space that’s just for us, in between dimensions, next to a couple of nebulas, where we can roll up in blankets and throw pillows if we want and breathe the impossibly clean air and bump our head on the skylight.

Which Kate proceeds to do—she’ll have a bruise, yet another bruise, in the morning, or whatever time it might be back on Earth, but it doesn’t matter, when you get time to tangle up with your best friend in an interdimensional treehouse you are going to take it, Kate Bishop, and mysteries can wait. (So can Johnny, who gave you permission for something like this, if it came along.) 

Then Kate nearly falls back into America’s arms, and this time it’s not her fingers or her tongue or her vibro-arrowhead but Kate’s left thigh, in between America’s thighs, so that the darker girl is rutting against the lighter one, her head tilted up so that Kate—to avoid a collision—has to rest her head on her friend’s shoulder as her friend moves up and in, up and down, so wet that they can keep going this way, Kate’s straight dyed-black hair against America’s curly near-black hair. Kate tastes her friend’s sweat on her friend's lips, and on her friend's shoulder blades, almost biting her bra strap (the bra tastes like nectarines, sweat, unstable molecules) as America moves up and in and up and down on Kate’s thigh, now very wet, then placing her own fingers inside herself, then falling back on the bed and bucking, and opening up her thighs as wide as ever and then closing them all the way with her own fingers inside herself, stroking, having spread herself out against her friend in a way that brought her just to the edge, and then over the edge…

America’s whole body moves underneath Kate’s, her knees, her shoulders, her ribs, her breasts (her half-shirt never came off), the whole of her body making sine waves of pleasure that pass through America and then through her black-haired, acrobatic friend, until Kate can’t kneel any more—her knees are too weak—and Kate almost flops down on the bed beside the strongest, most trustworthy woman she knows, the one who will come—who will come for her—who will come to get her, Kate thinks weakly, anywhere.

Another couple would surely wait longer before speaking but they're both smiling so broadly now that quiet would just seem solemn, and pointless. And they want to do it again. “That wasn’t practice,” Kate says.

“That was the real thing,” America agrees. “And so is this.” One of the pillows isn’t a pillow; it’s a silvery satin thing that with a few taps of America’s fingers morphs into something mercury-like and wet-looking, almost animate, that flows smoothly until it settles between America’s thighs, and darkens, and settles in over her pubis, above her cleft, until it’s almost (not quite) part of her body, extending outwards in a hard peak coming up from her pelvis, almost but not quite like a….

“That is very real,” agrees Kate, beginning to caress the extraterrestrial tool so that it gets even harder, sticking out straight up from America’s buff and curvy form.

Then Kate is folding herself against America’s body, making an S, an SZ. Kate licks America’s breasts through that sturdy half-shirt with the unavoidable five-pointed star, and smiles, and then America flips Kate on her back and says “Before we go kick ass together, amiga, and before you get your bow back, there’s something else I want to give you first. The girls at Sotormayor University were passing it around.”

“Can we share?” Kate says, as she’s tugging her own costume briefs (solid purple, of course) down and down, and the silvery three-dimensional thing—you can’t call it a strap-on, Kate thinks, because there are no straps, right now it’s just in—or on, or out of, as well as in—Amy’s body—is headed right down and toward and into Kate’s very wet and welcoming space. And it’s Kate’s turn to fall back on the bed and throw her head back and close her eyes and make sounds that makes sense in any language, or none.

Kate has been with America—the only girl she’s ever been with, so far!—and she’s been with guys, human and not quite human, but she’s never—she’s never—it’s been a while. 

The moment goes almost too fast: one moment Kate is concentrating on America’s broad hips, her broad shoulders, the way she looks down at her friend as if to pass along all the confidence she got by dimension-hopping and team-leading and knowing exactly who she is and who she wants to be, confidence Kate has always found amazing and also, somehow, girlish in its optimism—

and then, the next moment, Kate can’t form a thought, because her friend is truly inside her, throbbing and moving inside her, turning her not so much inside-out as inside-wet, she wants this girl to come from another dimension and stay inside her all the time, she’s moving up and in and around and Kate is literally seeing stars, so many stars, she’s surrounded by stars—

and she bucks, herself, and contracts and expands and falls back on America’s bed, gasping, moving in waves, collapsing on the beach that is actually America’s coverlet (red white and blue of course, with a university crest) and then America’s other coverlet (aquamarine, with high-tech threads—maybe they keep her warm), and wrapping herself in the last wavelets of a kind of pleasure she’s been so long denied. (Since she moved to L.A., really. Pleasure there, sure. But this kind…. no.)

America has come again, too. She’s touching the silver extension of herself, seeing it as it gets very hard, and then less hard, and then folds back, minute by minutes, slowly, tenderly, until it becomes a small silver pillow with an oversize.pillowcase, resting on America’s pubic bone, as if held up by the hairs around it there its very existence a tease.

“You have,” Kate gasps after they lie there, so quietly, for so long, “you have impressive technology, America Chavez. We’ll have to make sure it never falls into the wrong hands.”

America moves to position Kate’s hand so that it’s almost on top of her…. technology. “We’ll need to schedule additional training sessions,” she says. “It needs to be kept in this secure location, for now.”

“No practicing,” Kate says.

“That wasn’t practice,” America says. “That was definitely a mission.”

Kate feels as if her bruises were gone (they’re not gone), as if her elbow and her knees and her shoulderblades and her concentration were truly ready for anything.

“I’m a crap leader,” Kate says, half-believing it, half-hoping it can’t be true. “But I’m a pretty good mission partner.”

“Your next mission in this dimension will take place Thursday,” America says. “I’ll collect you at 4pm from the Venice pickup location. Bring olive oil.”

Olive oil, Kate thinks. Huh. “You’ll also be needing this,” America adds, and reaches behind and then into yet one more mysterious morphing pillow to produce the archer’s lavender bow. She makes as if to toss the bow in the air, then hands it to Kate, and Kate catches it.

*

Next morning she’s back at the target range, without America (it’s only Tuesday), hanging out with Johnny (who knows about the interdimensional rescue mission, of course, but only in general terms). Clint’s on the phone that afternoon from Brooklyn. “How did you do?” the older archer asks.

“Six stocks in a row split,” Kate says, a bit short of breath, standing out in the sun. “What other advice you got?”

“Check your fletching,” Clint says, “put out the solar panel to recharge the solar trick arrows, and go get a rest. You’re as good as anybody alive, and definitely better than the bad guys. Hang out with friends. Come back tomorrow. But for now, stop practicing.”


End file.
